


Time To Play B-Sides

by elle_stone



Series: A Watch With No Hands [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:21:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24424942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: AnA Watch With No HandsInterlude.Bellamy and Clarke follow the mysterious flares through the woods, and make a discovery.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Series: A Watch With No Hands [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1422616
Comments: 10
Kudos: 34





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Burnin' For You by Blue Oyster Cult, to keep with the 80s title theme.
> 
> Catch me on tumblr @kinetic-elaboration.

Clarke insists that they wait until morning to set out, a plan to which Bellamy only reluctantly agrees. If he were by himself, he says, he wouldn't waste any time. Clarke finds this answer annoying, would find it infuriating except for the way that he stands in the middle of the clearing and tilts his head all the way back, trying to follow the trail of the flares across the sky, the pure yearning and determination in the angle of his body and the expression on his face. This is the Bellamy she first met, she thinks, the Bellamy who abandoned the only semblance of safety and community he had in the world, to set out on a desperate mission that must have seemed, at the time, even more reckless than this one. Yet she still finds herself nearly speechless in the presence of such single-minded, foolish, but somehow admirable resolve.

The flares are the first real proof that more of Bellamy's people exist out there, alive somewhere in the vastness of the forest, or in the mountains, or maybe farther beyond. When she stands up, she realizes her legs are shaking. Only then, after the lights of the flares have died away, does the enormity of the moment hit her. And for a second, she wonders if he's right, if they should set off running into the pitch black of the forest, as if some invisible clock were already counting down the seconds left to them.

But her calmer head prevails. She walks closer, links her arm through his arm, and lists off every practical benefit of waiting until light. The woods are safer, and easier to maneuver, during the day. They can pack extra food and supplies, in case the journey is long. She'll borrow a horse, and they'll make better time than on foot—and as his healer, she adds, with a slight smile, she really cannot recommend the strain of walking such a distance on his ankle yet.

He doesn't smile back, but he considers.

When he relents, it is only to insist they leave at dawn.

Clarke spends the night in Wells's house, in the bed next to Bellamy's, listening to him toss and turn in his fitful sleep. She gives no reason for the sleepover but he doesn't question it. Perhaps he needs the company as well as she does, though if she thought he might sleep easier with her close by, she's disappointed, and her own sleep is uneasy at best. Facing toward him, she finds herself watching the formless shadow of his body roll and turn. Facing away, she allows herself to close her eyes but still listens, alert, to the rustling of the sheets, as mysterious as the sounds of a monster in the dark, and yet the only hint that the outrageous events of the last day are even real.

So much harder, in the comfort of a familiar bed, warm and lost in the familiar caverns of her thoughts, her body at rest, to take for granted the presence of a stranger in her village, the stories of a man from space unfurling in the late afternoon light. The warmth of his arm around her. The soft pressure of his mouth against her mouth, a sensation she tries to play over and over, like a fool, as if it were the most important thing.

She wakes to the last rays of sunrise, with no memory of having fallen asleep. Bellamy is sitting up in his bed, the bedclothes a tangled pile at the foot of the mattress, examining the angry swelling of his ankle and scowling.

"I'll re-wrap that for you, before we leave" she says, instead of _good morning_ , as she pulls her hair back and out of her eyes. Bellamy just looks up and nods.

He is restless all morning, so tense that she can feel the strain in his muscles as if it were a pain in her own body, but she keeps herself focused. He needs her to stay focused. She forces him to eat breakfast while she walks out to the farm, and when she returns to find him pacing a circle around the clearing, she only jumps down from the back of her horse and says, "This is Jasmine. I've already packed us food, water, and medical supplies. I'm going to write Lincoln a note and then we can leave."

When she hands the reins to Bellamy, she notices a flicker of nerves break through the grimace he's been wearing since he woke. But he doesn't answer, and she doesn't expect him to. If there's a wall between them, she tells herself, it is formed of his own worry, his own preoccupation; it has nothing to do with her, or with regret. That’s what she has to believe. In his place, she would feel exactly the same, turn in toward herself in the same way. If this were Wells they were chasing, she would feel herself not as a human body at all, but as steel, not as a human soul but as a single purpose made flesh.

"Hey," Bellamy calls to her, and she stops mid-step and turns and looks at him. Jasmine is nosing curiously at Bellamy's ear, and as he leans out of the way, his expression is distorted by a wary unease, and almost impossible to read. The sun has fully risen by now and the temperature is climbing again, but the heat is clear and sharp and comes entirely from the angle of the light.

"Yeah?"

"Do you have any idea what direction we're supposed to be going?"

The first admission he's made that he needs her. That this is their journey, to make together. She doesn't smile, but her expression softens.

"The flares were coming from the south-east. That's over there." She points behind her, to the space between her house and Lincoln's. "Don't worry. I can keep us on course."

"I'm not worried," Bellamy mumbles, but his grip around the reins tightens.

“Good.” She turns on her heel, infuses whatever confidence she can into her voice. “Because I know what I’m doing.”

*

Under other circumstances, Clarke would find herself uncommonly content in this moment. The early summer heat wave has not broken, but the thick canopy of leaves overhead shades them from the worst of the bright sun, and Jasmine knows the path so well that she leads them through the forest with little need for guidance. Clarke holds the reins loosely in her hands and takes in the slight, soft details of the morning: the occasional huff of her horse's breath; the steady, muffled thud of hooves against the well-worn dirt of the trail; the sway of her own body as it follows the animal's movements, and how attuned she is, when she rides, to every tiny hill and every subtle slope in the Earth, in a way that she never is while walking. She watches the sun's rays gleam off the translucent green of the leaves. With some luck and a few decent rains, these pale greens will deepen into an emerald shade that seems almost to glow, to shine with its own light, the full green of growth and abundance as every tree and plant in the whole forest flourishes with a breathtaking richness. Maybe in time. This period of overgrowth is her favorite part of the season; she relishes in the extremity of it; she wishes that she herself would grow with a similar abandon.

Now, she thinks that perhaps such a wish is naive. _This_ is growth. What she is feeling now is growth, because even twenty-four hours ago she did not know of a whole civilization of humans still living, surviving in an utterly different way than her own people did, surviving in the knowledge that their existence is survival, and since coming to learn of them she has had to completely rearrange her view of the world and of humanity and of living. Or start to rearrange her view.

She is traveling even now toward an unknown settlement of unknowable people. Unlike yesterday, when she was so caught up in a whirlwind of activity and excitement, aware of her own role, and surrounded by the safe familiarity of her own village, now she has an unwanted amount of time to speculate, to lose herself in the cloud of her own thoughts.

These thoughts wander and split apart and combine, tangling themselves together in the quiet hollow where conversation should go, because Bellamy is not in the mood for talking. He's sitting behind her with his arms around her waist and his body pressed against her back, heavy, stifling, and for the first time since they met, she finds him truly inscrutable and strange. He grunts occasionally under his breath, pained sounds she hears him trying to bite down and swallow, and sometimes when the trail hits a particularly uneven patch, he tightens his hold on her, or swears under his breath. She can feel the tension in him. It radiates through his whole body and flows into hers in ugly, dark waves; faint echoes of it twist up in her stomach when he is particularly frightened or particularly annoyed.

Not that she blames him. Horses can't possibly exist in space. He's probably never seen one before, yet alone ridden on one, and though Jasmine is friendly and fond of humans, Bellamy still eyed her warily as Clarke explained to him how to climb on and balance himself on Jasmine's back. He'd shied away from the horse's attempts at friendliness, and the last comment he made was a snarky remark about falling to his death before he even made it out of the clearing. They'd only barely, awkwardly managed to get him into position, his twisted ankle not helping at all in the endeavor. Clarke was still on the ground and holding his hand tightly in hers. She would have made a cutting remark back, except that she could feel how hard he was gripping her fingers, could see on his face, in the deepening red of his cheeks and the sheen of sweat along his forehead, that he was only making light of his own fear.

She climbed up and settled in front of him, grabbed his hands and hooked them around her waist, and told him to hang on. _Just hang on_. Her tone was too short and too frustrated, even to her own ear, but her own nerves were rising like bile in her throat. The reality of their adventure was slowly settling in. And Bellamy was so close and so warm, and the intimacy of his hold on her was too much for the moment, which was already weighted down with such significance.

Nearly two hours later and she has gotten used to his touch, has even learned to read the slight variations in his movements: how his arms sometimes tense as the ground slopes down, how his breath hitches when they have to duck beneath an overhanging branch. The way he shifts sometimes, trying to ease the pain in his ankle, and how he grabs onto her harder with one arm when he has to use his other hand to wipe the sweat from his face.

What she cannot do is even begin to guess what he is thinking. Is he focusing, perhaps, only on memories of his sister? Is he lost in a thousand different worst-case scenarios? Is he holding himself steady only by a stubborn force of will, so strong that it blocks out any thought at all? Is his mind a jumbled mess of memory and worry and confusion, as Clarke's is?

If he were up for conversation, perhaps they could soothe each other's worries. Accepting Bellamy's presence, his mere existence, was easier yesterday because the time she spent with him was so ordinary. They walked through the village. They ate together. They talked. His past was extraordinary, nearly impossible, but he himself was just a person, just like her. Now he and his mind and his mood are all mysteries, and the silence between them, vast and empty like a desert of infinite, unbroken sand, has become a wasteland where only ugly thoughts and worries are given what they need to grow.

He's told her enough about his people to give her some idea what they’re like, though at the time, she only basked in the bright fascination of new knowledge, and set all of the details aside as too numerous and too strange to be immediately consumed. She takes them out now. Who are they really, these space people? These sky dwellers? She glances up through the leaves at the unblemished swath of light blue above. Such a beautiful space, she thinks, but not fit for human life, especially so far up that, from their homes, they could not even see the sun, and the sky itself was not a kaleidoscope of various blues but only an unchanging and eternal black. And so the people who lived there grew up harsh and unforgiving. Brutally focused, practical, uncreative. Narrowed down to their leanest selves without the bounty of the Earth to draw upon.

How could Bellamy, who pulled a flower from Wells’s garden and tucked it into her hair, and looked at her with such sweet longing, have grown up in such a place? How did it not stifle him, or even utterly destroy him?

Maybe it did, she thinks. Maybe yesterday she saw only scraps and hints of what he could have been. Maybe the quiet, tense, shadow-presence at her back is the real him, the majority of him.

"You okay back there?" she asks.

At first, no reply at all, as if he had forgotten how to speak in the long, barren stretch of silence between them. She feels movement behind her, but the gesture is unreadable. When she glances over her shoulder, she sees him staring down at the ground, his eyes heavy-lidded and his back bent as if under some incredible weight. He looks up and catches her staring, and she quickly turns away again.

"Surviving," he answers, then, a gruff and broken quality to his voice.

"Yeah, well, I noticed you hadn't fallen off dead onto the trail."

_Surviving._ As if that were the best he could do. He huffs out a low and inscrutable noise and she sighs, exasperated and spent. She guides Jasmine over a large, fallen branch in their path, feels the way Bellamy's hold tightens briefly, only relaxes with great strain, and then tries:

"I'm sure your ankle—"

"It's fine."

His ankle isn't fine but that, Clarke thinks, isn't the point. He doesn't want sympathy, or conversation, or perhaps even kindness. He wants to sink into whatever deep pit he has dug for himself and stay there until they reach the source of the flares, and maybe she should respect that. But she doesn't. She's part of this journey, now. She's facing the unknown just as he is. He is her guide, just as she is his, and she needs him. They need each other.

"I never would have guessed you were such a sullen traveling companion," she snaps, keeping her gaze steady on the path ahead, and only imagining the dark, surly cloud across his face.

"Then maybe you had me all wrong." He unhooks one arm from around her waist, and she pictures him wiping angrily at the sweat dripping down into his eyes again. "Maybe this is who I really am, Clarke, have you ever thought of that?"

*

They stop for lunch a little past noonday—Clarke's decision, with which Bellamy can only argue in vain. She finds them a spot in the shade, near a mossy, hollowed out log, jumps down to the ground and tethers Jasmine to a tree, then helps Bellamy slide down and onto his feet. For a moment, she has to hold up nearly his entire weight by herself, and the fear that she may drop him, that he might land on top of her in the dirt, overwhelms even the close, deep scent of him and the way he grabs onto her as if he were drowning.

She lets go of him only slowly once he is on his feet, because she feels his instability, the way his injured foot drags across the ground when he hops forward, trying to adjust his weight. A part of her does not want to step away at all. He's still sullen and angry, the expression on his face even more darkly miserable than it is pained, and yet just touching him, feeling the balance between them when her hands are settled at his sides and he is leaning, just so, against her, as if she were the fulcrum that kept him upright, infuses in her a sense of safety and clarity: a breath-catching clarity, but clarity all the same.

She gives him one more steadying pat, then grabs his walking stick and some of the food from their supplies, and hands the stick to him. His limp is even worse than when she first found him by the river, but this doesn't surprise her. He should still be keeping his foot elevated, not letting it hang down, and by now the pain must be intense even with the support of her carefully wrapped bandage around his ankle. She tries to marshal some sympathy for his bad humor, but he's still being so damned irritating that it's hard.

"You know this is a completely unnecessary break," he says, as he follows her awkwardly off the path. "We shouldn't be wasting any time."

"This isn't a waste of time," Clarke answers. She settles down on the log and starts to arrange a neat, blue cloth on the space next to her. "Jasmine could use the rest. And we need to eat." She looks up at him, trying to read something besides annoyance in the narrow, stubborn set of his features. "Aren't you hungry?"

"No." He answers so quickly that she cannot tell if he's lying. But he does sit down next to her with a deep, exhausted sigh, and props his leg up on a nearby rock with something like an air of relief. "Which is another thing. We don't know how long this trip will take. We should be rationing our supplies."

Clarke rolls her eyes. Now, she thinks, he's just trying to argue for argument's sake. "We're not eating everything _right now_ ," she reminds him, as she sets out several pieces of bread and cheese and some fruit. "I brought plenty. And I know how to forage in the woods. And how to hunt, if we need to.”

To that, he appears to have no argument. He only makes a small, disagreeable noise under his breath, and starts picking at the berries closest to him.

After a few minutes, almost out of her mind in the quiet, only the small chirps and rustlings of animals in the forest to listen to and only the idle movements of Bellamy's hands, barely touching their food, to focus on, Clarke asks, "Are you really not hungry?"

He's been staring down at the moss on the side of the log, looks up abruptly at the sound of her voice. For a second, his expression is so open that she can read the honest surprise there, a hint of softness that reminds her of the previous night. Then, "I'm really not hungry," he answers, in that obnoxious, dismissive tone, and she has to stop her hands from clenching into fists.

"Well that's—I mean—" She cannot even explain to herself why she's so annoyed, as if he owed her his hunger, as if he owed her the luxury of being easily understood. "Well, why not?" Whatever is left of her own angry tone is shot through now with true confusion. Bellamy sets down the berry in his hand and drops his gaze. She wonders if he’s embarrassed, but why he should be ashamed, she cannot even guess.

She shifts a little closer. The cloth with their lunch is still between them, the distance that remains still too far for her to reach out with her hand. Something he said to her when they first met, _I'm pretty much always starving_ , flashes across her mind with tragic clarity.

"Is it that you're not hungry, or that you're used to being hungry?"

He shrugs, still doesn't look up.

She opens her mouth, considers, then tries again, this time with an unforced and apologetic calm. "I guess you didn't have much to eat in space. What about on Earth? Have your people figured out how to forage? How to hunt?" A part of her feels guilty for even voicing the question, that it is an insult to assume that Bellamy's people don't know how to find mushrooms or berries or nuts, at least. But then, she would not send out children, untrained in what is safe to eat and what is poisonous, to gather food for the village on their own, and the space people are in a way like children, too: new to the Earth, unversed in it.

When he turns to her, she sees for the first time how tired he is, that his earlier irritated manner was in part a mask to hide this deep-worn fatigue and this worry. "When I left Alpha, they weren't exactly putting on feasts like the one last night," he says, and Clarke holds back from telling him that the dinner he attended wasn't a feast. For him, she understands, it was. "But no one was dying of hunger. We always—we never thought we, any of the people alive now, would make it to the ground again but we thought _someone_ would, like our grandkids or great-grandkids. So we kept all that information alive as well as we could, stuff like how to hunt and how to navigate and how to build. Everyone learns some, and some people learn everything. We call them Earth Skills experts." He clears his throat, dips his gaze down again, as if realizing only now that this is the most he's said to her all day. Clarke waits patiently for him to go on. "So Alpha has Earth Skills experts and they'd... they'd go out every day and bring food for everyone. But it wasn't that different from the Ark. You just get used to it."

"To not having enough to eat?"

He shrugs.

Clarke considers for a long moment. Bellamy won't look at her, and so it's easy to take him in, to indulge herself with every detail of him, from the slumped set of his shoulders to the sun-sharp freckles that spread across his nose and cheeks, the dark circles like new bruises under his eyes. He's still wearing that heavy jacket of his, and he's shoved his hands in his pockets like he needs to keep them hidden and safe there, like otherwise he might reach out for the food he thinks they should be rationing with care. She sees the sweat that has collected on his top lip and at his temples. She wants to run her fingers through his messy curls, take him swimming in the river, lay him down in a soft bed and then reassure him that all of this is earned, that it is what he deserves. That he doesn't need to punish himself, as he seems so clearly to be punishing himself.

She takes a deep breath and straightens her own shoulders. Then she arranges the rest of their lunch in a careful pile in the middle of their makeshift tablecloth, and pushes it across the log toward him. "Here," she says. "You really should eat this. You won't be any good to your sister when we find her if you're stumbling around from exhaustion and hunger. So—really, eat." She speaks steadily and with a simple confidence, only losing her footing at the end, when a hint of the true worry she feels breaks through. That is what makes Bellamy look up at her again.

He takes his hands out of his pockets.

"And you can put your jacket in the bags with the rest of our supplies," she adds. "It's summer. You don't need it."

He cracks a smile, but it's thin. Then he mumbles a low, "Thanks," and starts to eat, with more purpose this time and less reluctance. But she still gets the impression that he is holding something back.

She has been wary of him this morning, she realizes. She's longed to talk to him, to find again the connection that seemed to snap so easily into place last night. But she's made little effort to close the wide and yawning gap that followed in its place. Latching on to his silence and assuming it was an accusation, retreating from it defensively, treating her thoughts as if they were his thoughts and his thoughts as if they were something she knew—that was too easy. Fearing him as a stranger transformed him into one. Yet he is the same man who spoke so honestly with her last night, in whose presence she felt a sweet blooming of instinctive trust. And if she trusts him, then she must trust that his retreat from her has its own source, a source quite apart from her: that he is not angry with her, or punishing her, but scared. Scared for himself and his sister. Scared for some reason that Clarke cannot yet fully discern

She isn't surprised when he says her name with unusual hesitance, and adds, "There's something I need to tell you."

He's eaten almost everything she laid out. She tucks her hands in between her knees and tilts her head, waiting, listening.

"Okay. What is it?"

"It's—about my sister." He pauses again, takes a deep breath. "Her station—it doesn't have Earth Skills experts. It doesn't have anyone with specialized skills on it at all—except, fuck, maybe some of the Guard, if they didn't move them—" He runs his hand over his face with a barely restrained violence that leaves Clarke more shaken than his words do. She barely understands what he's saying, but she knows she can only wait patiently to piece together this confession, whatever it is.

He tries again. "You know how I told you, yesterday, about how the Ark Prison works? That it only houses people under eighteen?"

A hard mass is forming in her gut, a paralyzing force that works from the center out, immobilizing her: a realization she feels, before she understands. All she can do is answer, slowly, "Yes."

Yes, the kid prison. Of course she remembers. The most horrific detail he'd shared with her, and all she had been able to think at the time was that she wished she could wrap her arms around him while he spoke.

"That's where she is," Bellamy says. "Prison Station. If that's where the flares are coming from—" His voice cracks briefly open, and in the fissure, Clarke hears just how desperately he wants to believe that this is true. "Look, I just wanted you to know that it's a possibility. I might be leading you to a bunch of criminals." He exhales, a sound like capitulation, and shakes his head.

Clarke wonders if he's expecting her to be angry, or scared, or to give up. If he is testing out the limits of his trust in her, too.

"Okay," she answers. "What kind of criminals are we talking about here?"

Bellamy's eyebrows shoot up. " _That's_ what you want to know? All kinds of criminals, Clarke—there's only one Sky Box. Murderers, thieves, violent offenders, arsonists—moonshiners, drug addicts, kids who attacked Guards—black market traders, kids who stole medicine or food their families needed... "

He trails off, waiting for her to express some degree of shock, or judgment. But she’s only turning around the obvious, unspoken question in her head: which one is Octavia? A murderer, an addict? Just a kid who was in the wrong place at the wrong time?

And the question underneath: does it matter? Would any answer change her resolve at all?

She folds her hands neatly in her lap, her gaze downturned to the gulf that stretches out between her knees and his. "It sounds like your people will come up with any excuse to lock up their own children," she says, slowly and thoughtfully, and without guilt. What is so frightening, she wonders, about their youth? What is so unsettling about them? A sharp spike of curiosity, like the stab of sun through shifting clouds, hits her with such sudden force that she almost rises to her feet right then, drawn to these mysterious people, desperate to know them.

Bellamy is staring at her, she notices, when she glances up from beneath her eyelashes at him. On his face an expression that is not quite astonishment, that is closer to relief, an unburdening from across his shoulders, a quiet and slow unfurling revelation, a slow easing calm. "You don't know the half of it," he answers. "You want to know why Octavia was put in the Sky Box?" He leans forward, so subtly that she's sure he does not realize his own movement, as if they were secret-sharing together in a small and hidden place, and he feared they would be somehow overheard. She doesn't answer, only watches him, unflinching.

"For existing," he says. Waits for her to answer but she can't, because what he's said is too incomprehensible, too bizarre. He shifts closer. "I told you that families can only have one child on the Ark, right?"

"Yeah. You mentioned something like that."

Yet she hadn't thought, hadn't put the pieces together, and now she feels caught off her guard and embarrassed, and she clenches her hands tighter together until her nails bite into soft skin.

"And Octavia is my sister. My younger sister. My—" He snaps his jaw abruptly shut, and Clarke sees a small tic at his temple, how he is grinding his back teeth closed. His shoulders roll back with the effort of a long, slow breath. "Most women don't keep their children, if they get pregnant a second time. But we—my mom—we hid Octavia in our quarters, underneath the floor."

Clarke follows his gaze. He seems to be tracing some invisible path along the dirt. Her palms hurt, where her nails claw, and she feels the shallow, painful intakes and outtakes of her lungs, burning in her chest. Except for these few bright spots of pain, she is numb.

"Bellamy—" she manages, and he shakes his head once, and briefly closes his eyes.

"She almost broke a record, for the longest time spent hidden. But then they found her when she was sixteen—" He pauses, and she feels the agitation in him, just as if they were skin to skin. She can all but hear it, a deeper layer of confession that he's wrestling with, but she's patient, and by the time he starts to speak again, she has already carefully folded up the piece of cloth from their lunch, and slipped it back into her bag, and slid across the log toward him and taken his hand. "Because of me, because I fucked up. And our mother was floated—executed—and I was demoted to janitor, and Octavia was sent to Prison Station. _Fuck_." His hands spasm in hers, but she holds them tight, both of his large, square hands between her palms. It feels so much better, so much easier, to be keeping him steady than trying to tear herself apart. "I knew I had to tell you, but I didn't mean—"

"Bellamy." His name in her softest tone, barely audible above the birdsong. He meets her eye with awkward hesitation and she tells him, "It's okay. It wasn't your fault."

"It _was_ —"

"All those rules you had in space—they were about saving resources, right? But now you're on Earth, and we have plenty. You've made it down here, and if she has, too, none of the past has to matter.” _Shit. Except—_ “I mean—" A flood of color warms across her cheeks. "I mean, I know that losing your mom can't be undone—"

"We don't have to talk about that."

"I don't mean to—I mean—"

"Clarke."

He untangles his hand from hers, reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. The backs of his knuckles graze briefly against her skin.

"If we sat here and talked through all of my complicated history with my mother, we'd never make it to the ship. I know what you're trying to say. But everything that happened up in space, it's not going to go away just like that. That's my past, my history. And I wish I could just say fuck it and—forget, but—" He sighs, a hard outtake of breath through his nose. "Right now, all I want is to find Octavia and know she's safe, and then keep her that way. And... I don't know." He manages a very slight, very reluctant smile. "You're almost making me think that might be possible."

"It is." Knowing she has to be certain, she is certain, and she squeezes Bellamy's hand so tightly that she feels the pain in her own joints. "I promise, Bellamy. Your sister has a place here. All of those kids do."

"Can you really promise that?" The smile slips from his face, and Clarke recognizes it for the forced expression it was, how he wanted to feel that certainty, that optimism, more than he does. "Honestly?"

"No," she admits. "Not the first part."

"Not even the second," Bellamy corrects. "Would your village really take in a hundred criminals?"

Clarke hesitates, knows that the confident answer she wants to give is a lie and that she owes Bellamy more than that, knows that he would turn away from anything but an honesty to match his own. "I don't know," she says. "I don't know. But I would, if I were in charge. They haven't done anything to harm us, and—and coming back home should be a blank slate, a new beginning. I really believe that. I really believe it's possible to start again."

He doesn't answer for a long time. Eventually, she realizes that she is passing her thumb back and forth across the skin just above his knuckles, watching its progress as if from an impossibly far distance. When she looks up, she finds that he is staring at her, the level aftermath of surprise settled across his features.

She’s just opened her mouth to ask him what that face is supposed to be for, when he says, "Coming home," low and faint and awed, and just like that, she understands.

*

They make steady progress through the afternoon, despite the high sun, the unrelenting heat of the day. Occasional stretches of deep shade offer relief. Wafting shadows of leaves pattern the trail ahead, set in motion by a slight, almost unnoticeable breeze.

Bellamy is still not up for talking, and neither is Clarke, but the silence between them has become companionable. His hold around her waist has relaxed. She doesn't feel the same tension from him, although he does still mumble darkly under his breath when they encounter an unexpected bump of uneven ground, and she knows that he's still tired, still worried, from the way he sighs sometimes, so low that perhaps he does not think she can hear. Or perhaps he does not mind that she can hear. Once, he lets himself slump forward, resting his head between her shoulder blades.

She has to remind herself to keep her breathing steady, to be steady for him like he needs.

Behind her, he sits up straight again and clears his throat. Clarke lets out a long breath, the breath she did not realize she was holding.

"How did you start drawing?" Bellamy asks, then, the first time either has spoken in nearly an hour, the last question she expected to hear from him. She doesn't answer, and he adds, "I mean, what made you decide you wanted to?"

She glances over her shoulder. He's tilted his head back—the sun glints off the sweat of his neck, along the sharp line of his jaw—and he's staring at the play of the sun through the leaves. She wishes she could see with more clarity the expression on her face. She can only guess, in broad outlines, what it might be: awe, disbelief, that particular low thrum of joy that comes from taking in some unexpected beauty of the Earth.

"I don't know," she admits, as she turns forward again. "I don't remember when I started or even what I was playing around with. Art has just always been a part of my life. Creating is just... this obvious, natural thing. It's like asking, why do you speak? Why do you communicate?" She chances another look back at him, finds him staring at her, pensive, the slightest furrow creased between his brows. "That's the best way I can describe it, I guess."

"That makes sense." He doesn't sound like he follows, exactly, and she bites back a smile despite herself. He is trying. "I mean—" A long, low sigh, and she imagines him glancing around them again, at the varied shapes of the leaves, the tiny plants growing by the side of the trail, the moss creeping up along the tree trunks. "I mean it's very pretty. I can see how... you'd be inspired."

"Being inspired is only part of it," Clarke answers, a sharp retort without thinking, immediately feels an unpleasant heat along her cheeks. The words bubbled up from her, bitter and unwanted, and she swallows the rest down, or tries to, pretending that she does not feel Bellamy's eyes on her and that she cannot imagine the curious, questioning tint to them. He doesn't ask, but she clarifies anyway, "I'm just saying that wanting to create, by itself, isn't enough. Even having something you want to—" She cuts herself off with a hard hum, a buzz against the back of her lips. "I haven't been able to draw in months. That's what I'm saying. The pictures you saw last night, those were the last ones I finished."

From behind her, only a quiet, sympathetic sound. Then: "I know you're not asking me for advice. And that's good, because I don’t have any."

"Believe me, advice is something I have more than enough of." The words come out hard and anger-coated, but a moment later, she glances back at him again and adds, softer, with a smile at her own expense, "I do live in a community of artists."

"I did notice that."

His smile, and a moment's bright flash of desire, to capture what cannot ever fully be contained, to try—

"Anyway—" She clears her throat, her expression becoming serious again as she turns back to the trail. "Anyway, I don't need advice. I know why I haven't been able to draw, or sketch, or create anything."

_Because it isn't important. Because I didn't go after him when I should have. Because I let him go, and nothing else matters. Nothing matters in the same way anymore._

"But it's okay," she adds, fast, before Bellamy can get in a word. If there was a moment when she felt tears, sudden and unbidden, pricking at the corners of her eyes, it has passed. She's in control again. "What's important now is finding your people. That's what we have to focus on." She reaches down and covers his hand with hers, briefly squeezes his fingers. "And we are going to find them." 

"You sound pretty confident about that."

He does not sound confident, and every bit of certainty she does not feel herself, does not completely trust, builds itself up in her, because she needs to be contrary or because she needs to be reassuring she cannot decide, but it doesn't matter. For him, she has no doubts.

"I _am_ confident about it. The woods open up not too far from here, at a lake. We'll probably get there early tomorrow morning."

"You think we'll find something there?"

"I don't know. But this spaceship of yours must be pretty big, right? At some point, we have to see some sign of it."

*

They make camp for the night in a low, narrow valley not far from the path, settling down to sleep with the comforting rise of the hill at their backs. The night is warm and clear. Clarke knows there is nothing she can do to ease the tension from Bellamy's frame, or lessen the worry she can hear in each of his shuffling, restless movements and the way he sighs under his breath. She's said everything she can say and now they're lying next to each other again, much closer than last night, so close that when her eyes adjust to the moonlight, she can read the narrow look in his eyes, watch the shining white of them as his gaze jumps back and forth, unfocused, across the ground and over the tree roots and the dirt and the stray flowers. He turns over onto his side, one arm squashed underneath him, the fingers of his other hand wafting absently over the ground. He seems uncertain of it still. When he glances up, and notices her staring, she does not bother to look away or close her eyes, does not need him to think she was sleeping.

She rearranges herself, seeking out a more comfortable position on the uneven forest floor.

What feels real now, in the quiet, with the background tune of cricket song, and so far away from her people and from his, are only a few stray memories and the gleam of his eyes in the dark. His fingers awkwardly trying to balance a flower behind her ear. The wide press of his hand against her cheek. And the hesitant and simple and sweet touch of his mouth when they kissed.

Spaceships and aliens and the distant wars of the past, human beings who lived and died and the memory of whom has faded so radically and so cleanly away—what does any of that matter to her now?

A selfish thought. She reaches out and rests her fingertip in the space between his eyes, which is deeply furrowed, and lends his entire expression a tense and worried cast. Bellamy's breath hitches. Clarke traces the path of his eyebrows, first to the left, then to the right. Then down his nose. Down over his lips. And when she starts to pull her hand away, he captures it with one of his own, and presses a kiss to her fingers.

The insect sounds and the faint swish of movement in the treetops, swaying in a distant, sky-tall breeze, drown out all other noises, even the incoherent thrum of thoughts in her head. She shifts closer, aware of the rough slide of her clothes against the unfurled blanket that is passing as her bed. Lets her fingers stretch up toward Bellamy's cheekbone, her palm now against his cheek.

She's trying again to picture living between the stars, which seem from below so impossibly distant, a scattering of pinprick lights, of living there and seeing from above not just the whole earth but the whole history of the earth and everyone who has ever lived on it, knowing everything that can be known. Or believing at least that everything is knowable. She imagines such people might come to think themselves beyond humanity, beyond and better than the small, simple, perfect moments that form the trail of her own life and give it meaning and substance and worth. And yet—Bellamy, here next to her. Turning his head to kiss her palm, the center of her palm, the heel of her palm, letting each kiss linger in just the way that she lets the sunlight linger on her face on the first true day of spring. He does not seem like someone who has placed himself above the everyday and the ordinary but rather like an explorer, coming to know a new world for the first time, dwarfed by it, and aware that he is overcome.

She urges him to look at her. Her fingers tangle up in his hair and she's pulling him close, finding his lips with hers again. His arm around her and the solid breadth of him, and how he takes his time in opening his mouth to hers, all bring alive in her a certain giddiness like floating, and yet at the same an undeniable security, the slow exhale of homecoming. This steady familiarity is bound together still with the thrilling way his hand settles just at the base of her back, and prompts her to arch in close, in the same half-moment when they break apart to catch their breaths. His nose bumps against her nose. She feels the way he smiles between soft kisses.

_It's all right, it's all right, it will be all right_ , she wants to say, promises she cannot know if she can keep. She knows so little. She knows that she herself saw explosions of red flame across the sky. She knows that Bellamy is resilient and strong, that he comes from people of great resiliency and strength. She knows that, if he is right about the past, then so does she. That's enough, enough reason not to let go.

They do sleep, fitfully, through the deepest hours of the night, but even then curled up together, Clarke's mind trying to race despite the heavy pull of sleep. She finds herself caught up in confusing spirals of worry and excitement and yearning, and all of these half-thoughts pulled apart and unraveled by hazy, dream-like fantasies, of Bellamy, the close wandering of his touch along her skin.

*

The next morning, Bellamy repacks their bags while Clarke rewraps his ankle, worrying her bottom lip as she takes in the swelling that still persists. "No matter what, we're stopping at the lake," she tells him, as she hauls herself to her feet again, dusts off her palms. "You can rest, put your ankle up—I'll walk the perimeter and see if I can find any signs of unusual activity."

"Unusual activity," Bellamy repeats. He winces as he stands, leaning heavily on his walking stick and exhaling a pained breath through his nose. "What does that—even mean?"

Talking and taking even a few hobbling steps at the same time seems to be too much of a challenge. Luckily, he does not catch the expression on her face, a deep worry covered by irrational annoyance.

"Exactly what I said. I know this area better than you do anyway. If something's different—signs of an abandoned camp, maybe—I'll notice it."

"I think I'd notice a whole abandoned campsite—"

"Bellamy." He's walked almost even with her now, and she turns abruptly on her heel to face him, and sets her hands on his shoulders, head tilted back to grab his gaze. "If you don't elevate your ankle, it won't heal. We don't know where your sister is or how far away she is. I'm not saying we should abandon the trail or head back but you need to take care of _you_ , too."

He stares at her, his mouth slightly open, a blank uncertainty across his features, as if no one had ever suggested before that he pause and place his own well-being in the forefront of his mind.

Then he tries a smirk, a hollow expression like a mask. "Are those doctor's orders?"

Clarke gives a short, smart nod. "Yes."

His smile widens, shades almost imperceptibly into the genuine, and on impulse, she leans up on her toes and kisses his cheek.

She does not bring up the previous night, which seems now muddled and vague around the edges, less a memory than a dream. To discuss something so impulsive and yet so beautiful seems neither urgent nor even plausible, in the gray shine of the first hour after dawn. She holds it instead like a secret there in the touch of her hand, the curve of her smile. And she thinks, but cannot be sure, that she reads its mirror image in the fond expression on his face, and the way he exhales, a deep breath, and lets some of the rigidity leave the hard line of his shoulders. His gaze slips from her face and he looks out past her to the path again, and the tangle of trees ahead.

*

Clarke sees it up ahead, barely visible through a break in the trees, foreign and monstrous and glinting in the sun. She does not know what it is. She does not know, either, if Bellamy has noticed it. Then she feels his grip around her tighten, and his shaky outtake of breath in her ear and something that sounds like _go_ , whispered so that she barely hears it but feels it like a shiver across her skin. She urges Jasmine on faster. She strains her neck forward, trying to discern something of this strange thing’s color or its shape, but what she can see is so small—she already knows this is only a piece, only the smallest piece.

They reach the end of the trail, riding out past the tree line and onto the strip of grass that slopes down toward the shore. Then Jasmine stops. And Clarke's heart stops, stutters, resumes again now in her throat, as she tilts her head all the way back. Her jaw falls open. And her eyes grow wide.

A massive structure, roughly rectangular and made of dull gray metal, has landed at the edge of the lake. Some part of it has sunken beneath the water, and the rest, what percentage Clarke can only guess, has embedded itself in the sand. This massive thing, unnatural and looming, is not bright and gleaming as Clarke had thought it would be, but scarred with dirt and inscrutable markings, its surface worn and uneven, and ragged at its edges, as if, despite its size, it is still only one part of an even larger whole. Its rough landing has left it tilted ever so slightly on its side. This imbalance makes Clarke dizzy, makes the presence of the object that much more undeniably _wrong_. It marks a disconcerting contrast with the pleasant and familiar sweep of the forest behind, the glimmer of the lake, the stunning rise of the distant mountain peaks. The sky above is a dazzling blue, the first full light of day glinting off the brightest bits of silver still visible on the marred outsides of this—this thing.

This ship.

This space station.

The door to the structure has been left open, and from the black hole of its mouth, a scrap metal ramp descends, bridging the gap between the door and the beach. Beyond the ramp, several large pieces of sheet metal have been cobbled together, creating a platform that extends out across the sand in a broad rectangle, reaching almost all the way to the first scrappy bits of grass.

"Is this one of your ships?" Clarke whispers. It's an idiotic question but she needs to hear Bellamy say it, because he's been too silent, and too still, because he’s holding on to her with a grip as stiff and hard as granite, and she needs to know that he’s okay.

"Yeah," he answers. But it’s a slow, creaking word, pitched much too low.

Clarke wants to glance back at him, to see his face, but she's distracted by a sudden, slight movement in the shadow of the door. There. A figure, too far removed from the light to be fully discerned. Clarke holds herself completely still, willing herself to be unafraid, despite the animal-fear that has shot a straight jolt of adrenaline through her. She watches as this new space-person comes closer, closer toward the light.

Something strange about its movements—whoever it is, Clarke sees now, is sitting. She can just make out knees and the edges of a pair of giant wheels, rolling the chair forward—

"Yeah, it's one of the Ark Stations," Bellamy is saying.

_We've been seen_ , Clarke thinks, with simple clarity, as the figure stops in the doorway, fully visible now in the fullness of the morning sun. _We've been seen and there's no going back._

Bellamy sighs, and raises his arm in a broad wave. But his voice is still low as he leans forward and whispers briefly in Clarke's ear: "But it’s not Prison Station. It’s Mecha."


	2. Chapter 2

_Mecha_ , he says. _Mecha_ , as if the word had any meaning to her. As if it did not sound like syllables cut off and mangled from a foreign tongue. The word, or bit of word, hits her ear sharp-edged and rusted like the battered form of the ship, like the overgrowth of the ruins as they collapse in upon themselves, like the silhouette of Jasper and Monty's house, put together from excavated pieces of an old world. _Mecha_. She looks up again, trying to understand.

The woman in the wheelchair is waving back at them.

The movement of her arm catches Clarke's attention, and she snaps her attention back to the ground again. "Do you know her?" Clarke asks, under her breath, as if they were still hidden in the shadow of the trees, and glances back just in time to see Bellamy nod.

"Hey, Reyes," he shouts, so loudly that Clarke cringes from the sound. Then, in a more reasonable tone, and slightly abashed, "Clarke, can you help me get down?"

The woman, Reyes, wheels herself down the ramp and toward them, her movements across the makeshift metal floor as tentative and wary as the long, slow arcs of her arm had been. Clarke has to focus on dismounting, and then awkwardly hauling Bellamy back down onto his feet, or at least onto his foot, so she can't spare more than a few quick glances over her shoulder. She can't do much at all to take this new person in. Being distracted helps her, in a way. Focusing on Bellamy, on holding him up as he gets his balance, on unpacking his walking stick, softens the surreal bubble of this moment, the looming mystery of the ship, the gaze like an interrogation that she can already feel at her back. _Reyes_ , she thinks, _from Mecha Ship. No. Mecha **Station**_.

_Reyes from Mecha Station._

Bellamy, she is already used to. Bellamy appeared, strangely dressed and unknown, on her own territory, by himself, came to her village and told his stories on settled and familiar ground. Reyes, she already knows, will be different. She's got her whole home behind her, and who knows how many friends, and even though the lake belongs to no one, still Clarke feels like she's become a trespasser now on foreign soil.

What this might be, nerves or excitement, welling up in her, suffusing her lungs, pricking her skin, she doesn't know. She lets Bellamy lean on her as they walk, his arm around her shoulders, even though he has his cane now, too.

"Blake," Reyes calls back, as they hobble over slowly. "I thought that was you." She's parked herself just short of the end of the floor, leaned back in her chair with her arms crossed and her chin tilted up, to look at them, and the way she narrows her eyes into the light makes Clarke feel as if she were the shorter of them, and Reyes was looking down at her. Perhaps examining her. She’s flicking her gaze quickly between Bellamy and Clarke, her mouth not quite closed, as if another question or an observation were just there on her lips. Not quite believing what she's seeing, Clarke thinks at first, and then decides, no: more like she's walking the thin line between amazed and amused.

"How did you get all the way down here?" she asks, when Clarke and Bellamy step onto the metal floor at last.

"Same as you," Bellamy answers, around awkward attempts to catch his breath. "In a giant—hunk of—space metal."

"Hey, don't speak ill of the Ark," Reyes warns. "Or at least—not of Mecha." She looks behind her for a moment, a furrow between her brows that Clarke reads as sadness, or regret. "She had a rough landing. And that's not what I meant."

"I know." He hops slightly to the side, disengaging himself from Clarke at last, wincing as he tries to find a comfortable way to balance his weight on his feet. "This is Clarke," he says. "Clarke, this is Raven Reyes. She's a mechanic."

"Zero-G mechanic," Reyes corrects, and holds her hand out for Clarke to shake.

"I have no idea what that means," Clarke says, as she returns the handshake, feels Reyes's palm against hers warm and firm. A part of her, as giddy and irrational as a child, buoys and floats at the simple contact, moved by Reyes's unblinking stare and the open, intense, searching expression on her face. She has her hair pulled up in a ponytail and the sleeves of her red jacket pushed up to the elbows, gives off an unfiltered air of having nothing to hide.

"You're not from the Ark," she says, when she lets go of Clarke's hand, and the statement is so slow, lilts almost, but not quite, into a question, that Clarke understands she knows the truth of it but does not entirely believe.

"I'm not, no," she answers. Tries to smile. "Did the clothes give it away?"

Reyes smiles, too, but the expression is faint, not entirely certain.

"Clarke is a Grounder," Bellamy says. "She's from a village about a day's ride that way, through the forest." He takes a brief look across the shore, the lake, as if searching out settlements among the sand. "I take it you haven't run into any Grounders yet?"

"I haven't been able to _run_ into anything," Reyes answers, rueful. She's still staring at Clarke, taking her in from head to toe, her gaze always returning to Clarke's face. "You're really a Grounder? You were really born here, on Earth?"

Clarke nods. "Quite a bit less weird than being born in space," she says. She crosses her arms, a purposeful imitation of Reyes's pose. She's outnumbered, perhaps badly so; she’s the outsider now; and the hulking form of the ship in the background still calls for her attention but—these are the people Lincoln imagined in his flying silver disks, the sort of myths children talk about in campfire stories all through late summer nights. The myths they’ve made from forgotten histories. And her fascination makes her brave.

The corner of Reyes's mouth quirks up. "Maybe," she concedes. "Still pretty weird. So how did you meet Bellamy? Did Factory land near your village?"

"I didn't come down on Factory," Bellamy says. "They moved me to Alpha at the last minute."

"What?” She frowns, turns back to him. “Why would the Council do that?"

He shrugs. "No idea. Wanted to make the population on each station more even? They didn't exactly give us an explanation."

"Of course not. Not like there was time—"

She cuts herself off, then exhales a sharp breath. Clarke glances from one face to the other, but can read neither, the volleys between them too quick and the dark, pained frowns they wear, like mirrors of each other, reflections of a past she does not know. The darkness of a pool, its surface distorted by ripples, whose depth she cannot fathom. They were running out of oxygen, Bellamy told her—now she wonders just how fast the crisis came upon them, and she reaches out and squeezes his forearm with her hand.

"So where's the rest of Alpha, then?" Reyes asks. "Were there any other survivors?"

The flat, simple way she asks the question make Clarke turn her gaze beyond her again, to the half-submerged, tilted ship. No one else has yet come to the door. She tries to discern details of the inside, but all she can is blackness, hints of darker shadow that may only be tricks played by the sun.

"Yeah. Hardly any casualties," Bellamy answers. Then: "Last I checked."

Reyes narrows her eyes, listen without shock as he tells the short version of his adventure through the forest, how he hurt his ankle, how Clarke found him by the river and took him home.

"That explains the bandage and the cane, then," Reyes says. And then, lower, a hint of softness that might be sympathy: "Are you looking for Prison Station?"

Bellamy nods. Clarke still has her arm linked through his arm. She can feel the tension in him.

"You know they probably didn't even send it down."

"They did. I heard Byrne and Kane talking about it." He clears his throat, squares his shoulders, and Clarke understands that, however they knew each other in space, they were not the sort of friends who shared secrets, or allowed vulnerabilities to seep in. He sounds awkward when he adds, "If you're wondering about your boyfriend—"

"He's not my boyfriend anymore, but yeah." She wheels herself back, half-turns herself to the side, toward the lake. "It would be nice to know if he's still alive.” She pauses, a half-moment only, still doesn’t look at them as she changes the subject. “Good to know that Alpha made it down all right. Mecha—" She gestures back behind herself, then drops her hands onto the wheels of her chair and swings herself around, so that she’s facing them again. The chair must have been made, Clarke sees now, from parts salvaged from the ship: though it moves easily enough at her prompting, it nevertheless has a rickety air, and none of its various components seem of a piece with each other. A solid design, she determines, and well-built, but not under ideal conditions. She looks over Reyes's feet and legs and sees that her right thigh is bandaged, and her leg slightly elevated, held out on a small pedestal attached to the footrest of the chair.

Clarke takes a half-step forward, then hesitates, her fingers tense at her sides. "Do you have many wounded?" she asks.

"We lost half the ship," Reyes answers, abrupt and bitter, as angry as if Clarke herself were at fault. Or as if she feared she herself was. "And more than half the people. We landed partway in the lake, and I guess we're just lucky the whole station didn't end up underwater. But it fried our computer system, killed our tracking beacons, our radio. Almost everyone who survived the landing was injured, in some way or another." She looks down at her own legs, a sorry and rueful half-smile on her face. Clarke feels the same pause of uncertainty that always comes upon her when she has to be the one to give bad news. She chances a look back at Bellamy, and sees that he's staring off toward the shore, his own expression twisted with embarrassment and sorrow.

"Some people were hurt worse than others," Reyes adds. "We've been doing what we can just to keep the rest of us alive."

"I'd like to help," Clarke says, and allows herself another step closer, earnest and well-meaning as she tries to catch Reyes's eye. "I'm a healer in my village. If you introduce me to yours—"

"We don't have any doctors," Reyes interrupts. "Only one came down with us and she didn't survive the landing."

To this, for a long moment, Clarke has nothing to say. She tilts her head, her brows furrowed low over her eyes. Then she looks past Reyes’s head to the great, towering, beast-like ship, only half of it even visible beyond the edge of the lake: a creature crawling, wounded, from the water. How many people might fit into such a structure as this? How many might still be alive and struggling vainly to help each other—she remembers playing with dolls as a child, pretending she was her mother, treating their injuries and curing their illnesses with made up potions and pretend treatments because that was all she knew.

"Most people who live on Mecha are engineers and mechanics," Bellamy tells her. "They know everything about the ship but—"

"Not much about the human body," Reyes finishes ruefully. She taps the side of her wheelchair and adds, "Figured out how to make this, though. And how to block off the submerged part of the ship so the rest of us didn't drown. We're not helpless out here."

She's trying to convince herself, Clarke thinks, looks awkward and embarrassed when she tries to smile.

"I know," Clarke says. She does her best to make her voice sound soft, forgiving, but a hard, determined edge forms around her words all the same. "But you were trying to find someone when you sent out those flares, and you found us. I have some experience with bandaging wounds. If you don't mind—?" She gestures to Reyes's leg.

Reyes doesn’t answer right away, looks to Bellamy for confirmation or to buy herself some time, while Clarke watches her with an even stare and pretends she does not notice this consultation behind her back. Then Reyes nods.

Immediately, Clarke closes the gap between them and kneels down at Reyes’s side. The sun-warm metal burns beneath her legs, hard and uncomfortable, and the full heat of the day settles on her. But as she works, she lets her world collapse and narrow, ignores the soft breeze off the lake as easily as the steady beat of the sun, and the low bitten-down sounds Reyes makes, and the two foreign, inquisitive stares she can feel trained on her. She loosens the bandage with careful, deliberate movements and peers at the injury underneath. Severe, she thinks, but no immediate signs of infection at least. Working around the frame of the chair is awkward, nearly to the point of impossibility, and she knows she can do little here.

"You'll have to let me take a closer look at this later," she says. "But for now, I can at least change this bandage. It's obviously been on way too long."

"Change it with what—?" Reyes starts to ask, then cuts herself off when Clarke stands up again and retreats, without another word, to the edge of the forest, where she and Bellamy left Jasmine and all of their provisions.

She returns with her bag of medical supplies, kneels down again, and expertly begins to re-wrap the wound with fresh cloth. The original bandage appears to be some hastily cut or torn material, perhaps from someone's clothing, originally a light gray but now warped and encrusted with deep red stains of blood. She hesitates to ask how long, exactly, it's been tied around Reyes's leg. While she works, she has Reyes tell her the story of her injury, as much to distract her as for the information itself: the narrative is peppered with words Clarke doesn't understand, about the room she was in when the space ship came down to Earth, about the particular equipment that fell on her—but the type of pain she describes, which speaks not only to deep lacerations but to injured bones, at least rings true.

"So," Clarke says, as she gets back onto her feet and dusts off her hands, "have I proven myself?"

She has. She knows she has, but she likes the small, falsely wary smile that Reyes gives, the begrudging appreciation of her joke. "Not sure. Did you have to make the bandage so tight?"

Clarke nods, once. "Yes. I did." She crosses her arms against her chest. "You said you had a lot of injured people. Let me see them. I'll do what I can to help them today and then we can bring everyone to my village. Or bring my mother and our other healers to you, if we need to. Do you have enough food? Enough medicine?"

For reasons she doesn't entirely understand, Reyes's smile has grown warmer, but at the same time more genuinely amused. "Why are you offering all of this?" she asks.

"Why wouldn't you?" Clarke counters. "If you were me?"

Reyes's hand settles lightly on her injured leg, the clean, white cloth that Clarke has wound there. "I guess I would," she admits. She lets out a deep breath and starts to pivot her chair back in the direction of the ship. "All right. Point taken. Let's go."

"Okay." Clarke picks up her bag and slings it over her shoulder, straightens her back and gives the ship one more searching look. She's not sure what she's up against, what she might see on the inside: how many injured people she'll encounter and how out of her depth she may be. But all she can think as she approaches the entrance ramp is that she is as space explorers once were: entering a vessel that was made for the sky and the stars. Only a few days ago, she would not have believed such people could exist. Now she's walking in their footsteps, the hollow reverberations of the metal beneath her feet unsteady and surreal, so that she feels almost as if she were floating.

*

Just as Clarke squares her shoulders and looks up at the ship, Bellamy catches Raven's gaze out of the corner of his eye. She's grinning at him. Clarke sets out ahead of them, leading the way up the ramp, and Raven makes silent, exaggerated kissing motions at the air, and wiggles her eyebrows.

"Shut up," Bellamy mouths, and does his best to hobble his way faster toward the entrance.

The damage to Mecha, seen from the inside, shocks him more than the destruction of Alpha did. Not having been here to experience its transformation firsthand, to feel the same shock of landing in himself, all he could picture in the moment before he stepped through the doorway was the station as it used to look. In his mind, it is busy with people, humming with the background noise of oxygen generators, layered with the chatter of voices and the thick stomping of boots, lit by the fluorescence of the overhead lights that run in straight, narrow lines along the ceiling. Now he glances up and sees that the lines are dark and gray, and that the only light that pierces the dim corridor shines in through the holes in the ceiling, where, like Alpha's, it has crumpled in upon itself. The floor slopes subtly, but noticeably, beneath them, from the off-kilter landing of the ship. Through the doorways, he sees piles of furniture heaped in the corners of rooms, where anything that wasn't bolted to the floor slid and fell together in a jumbled mess.

What is most jarring, though, is the silence. The near-silence, and every little disturbance, like tiny indentations, that marks it, and makes walking through Mecha feel like making his way through a ghost town, the sort of mirage he might see in a dream. He hears his own footsteps, uneven and interrupted by the intermittent thumps of his walking stick; and Clarke's footsteps, slow and nearly reverent, as if she were unwilling to disrupt the quiet of the ship; and the steady roll of Raven's wheels against the metal floor as she pushes herself past them, and leads the way. Barely audible, and stranger still, he hears the steady breaking of the waves upon the shore beneath them, and once, the high-pitched cry of a bird crossing the sky above.

All of the people are gone and all of the machinery is dead, and in place of all of these familiar sounds are slight reminders of the world outside, that Mecha no longer floats above the Earth but is embedded in it, surrounded by air and water and dirt.

As they turn a corner, he catches a glimpse, through a jagged hole in the wall, of the forest and its deep-green trees, their leaves shaking and fluttering in a burst of wind.

Clarke is staring at every detail of the ship with a slack-jawed awe, wide-eyed and disbelieving as she reaches out to trace her fingers along the wall, or tilts her head back to stare at the dents and tears in the ceiling. She seems equally fascinated by the floor, the plastic lines of emergency lights just as useless as the lights above, and the doorways, with their glimpses of rooms beyond. One door has been left half-open, as if its sliding mechanism had malfunctioned in the crash. The keypad next to it is dull now, no help at all in bringing the door back to life; the usual red and green lights at the top now show clear. He catches sight of her tapping at the numbers as they pass, as if the keypad were an instrument, and she a curious novice.

She notices him staring, looks up and smiles and shrugs. "Sorry," she whispers. Then she steps closer, and slides her palm into his, interlocking their fingers as they walk.

He wants to tell her it's okay but he'll have to clear his throat first, because he did not expect the sudden press of her hand against his to cause such a stopping in his chest and lungs. Just as surprising: this sudden well of fondness for how their old and broken ship seems like a work of art in her eyes.

Raven's voice, ahead of them, interrupts his thoughts too sharply, so that he has to shake his head and look away.

"We made the common room into our version of medbay," she's saying. To Clarke, she adds, "It's just around this corner and then down the hall."

Halfway down the corridor, visible as soon as they turn, a weak glow of light spills from an open doorway. "What's that?" Clarke asks. She steps forward a few paces, still not letting go of Bellamy's hand even as she strains to see.

"That's Sinclair," Raven answers. "He's head of Engineering. Which makes him the head of everything now."

"Lucky you," Bellamy murmurs. He'd take Sinclair over Kane or Byrne any day.

"We should introduce you," Raven adds, and gives herself an extra, decisive push toward the door.

Clarke hesitates, clearly torn between her desire to meet her patients and her curiosity about Mecha's leader, but Bellamy only smiles and shakes his head. "Come on," he says, and starts to turn them both to follow Raven's lead. "She's already made up her mind."

"I suppose it is appropriate," Clarke concedes, a low murmur, like an afterthought to herself, as they cross the threshold, still hand in hand.

Bellamy has never been in this particular room before. Cramped and dark, lit only by the dim glow of two handheld lights that have been propped up on either side of the work desk, it looks no bigger than a storage room, at most a workstation for trainees and new recruits. At the center of the desk is a radio unit, scattered parts arrayed around it. The work itself is spotlit by the lights, Sinclair himself only a hulking shadow at the far back of the room. He’s a human-shape among container-shapes and storage-unit shapes, his head bent, and so intent upon his work that he doesn't notice the sounds of their approach. He only looks up at the strident sound of Raven's voice:

"Look who I found loitering outside."

He startles briefly—"Oh!"—but hides his surprise well, is already smiling broadly when he squeezes his way around the table and brings himself into the light. The improvement is minimal, since all of the ship is gray and poorly lit. But at least in the doorway, something of the natural light of morning can filter in through the broken pieces of the ceiling in the hall. "Mr. Blake," Sinclair says, and holds out his hand to him. "It's been a long time since I've seen your face."

It's been a long time, Bellamy thinks, since he's seen anyone from outside Mecha, and now he's glad for tangible proof that other survivors made it down. That would explain, at least, the relieved expression on his face, and the way he clasps Bellamy's hand between both of his when they shake. Sinclair lets out a deep breath that seems to relax his whole frame, and Bellamy, despite himself, finds he's smiling tentatively too.

This greeting isn't about him—he hasn't spoken to Sinclair since he was kicked out of the Guard—and yet it's genuine, all the same. He feels a matching relief within himself, like homecoming, when he answers, "It's good to see you, too, Sir."

"I guess our flares worked, then," he adds, letting go of Bellamy's hand at last. He runs his palm across his forehead, briefly pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes, blinking them a few times as he opens them again. This frazzled air about him is unfamiliar, but from this close, Bellamy can see that his eyes are bloodshot and ringed with dark circles, and his gestures are marred by the slightest nervous, exhausted, tremor. "Did you land close—oh."

His gaze lands, at last, on Clarke, who has been standing quietly next to Bellamy and observing the reunion with steady, neutral eyes. When she notices Sinclair noticing her, she waves. Then she holds her hand out, too. "My name is Clarke. It's a pleasure to meet you."

For a moment, Bellamy is convinced that the pure shock of her presence has shaken loose the last of Sinclair's sanity, that this is the outward look of a man who now believes himself to be living in a dream. He gathers himself quickly. "Jacapo Sinclair," he answers, as he shakes Clarke's hand. "And you're—"

"A Grounder," Raven finishes. She's already wheeling herself out of the way of the conversation, tosses the word over her shoulder like an afterthought as she forces her way around the table to examine Sinclair's work.

"I'm from a village not far from here," Clarke adds, quickly, before Raven can explain anymore. "Bellamy and I just arrived. Reyes mentioned you had wounded—?"

"You can call me Raven." She doesn't look up as she says it, but Bellamy can discern, faintly, a smile at the corner of her lips. She's turning the radio over and peering at its exposed insides.

"Raven," Clarke corrects. "Right." She clears her throat, her focus briefly unsettled, then looks up at Sinclair again. When she speaks, she sounds as confident and authoritative as before. "She and Bellamy have told me a lot about your people. I think your ship is—"

"A mess?" Sinclair finishes, and Clarke stutters to correct him—"No, really quite amazing—"—before she realizes he's joking, and her shoulders relax, and she finally lets herself smile.

Over Sinclair's shoulder, Bellamy can see Raven prying at the edge of the radio unit, first with her fingernails and then with a small, thin metal rod. He limps his way around the table, letting Clarke get Sinclair up to speed on their most recent adventures, while he sets himself to examining the inscrutable spare gears, wires, and batteries in front of him.

Raven doesn't look up when he leans his forearms on the table next to her, but she does frown and tell him, "You're blocking my light."

"Sorry," he answers, and adjusts the small, weak panel so it shines more directly onto her. "Are you fixing that or breaking it?"

"Hopefully the first."

Fewer than two days have passed since he was staring at different malfunctioning radio, and a different, obsessive, stubborn inventor trying to build the impossible out of broken parts, trying to rebuild the destroyed. Easier to believe if he were told he'd been traveling for years and years through the forest. The journey seems a blur now, only a hard slash of frustration and guilt through his memories. 

He remembers, vaguely, the unsteady, nauseating gait of the horse, making him sway, and ducking beneath overhanging branches, and leaves that caught at his face. But even those details read like a story he is telling himself, faint like this leftover warmth across his skin. The sharpest memories now are of her: how he caught glimpses sometimes of her profile, half-turned to him, how he could feel her inhale deeply every time she was about to speak. Underneath the rest, he keeps a certain faded recollection, of calming himself by staring at the soft glow of the sunlight through her hair.

Clarke—

"What is that?"

Her voice startles him, as completely as if she were his vague daydream itself come to life, and he wonders how long he was drifting, as he straightens himself up and puts his weight on his walking stick again. Clarke is watching Raven work, her head tilted, an open and curious expression returned to her face.

"It's our main radio unit," Sinclair answers, taking a few steps closer and sighing as he rests his hands on the table.

"How we talk to each other," Raven adds. She glances up briefly, but misses the moment when Clarke crosses her arms defensively against her chest.

"I know that. My friends back home are working on something similar. But yours doesn't work, does it?"

This, at last, makes Raven drop her tools and lift her gaze. Her eyes narrow. She opens her mouth to speak, something sharp-tongued and disbelieving, then closes it again.

"Does yours?" she asks.

And Clarke admits, "No. They don't really know what they're doing. They have to figure it out as they go along."

"Working without memory," Bellamy adds, so quietly the words sound like no more than a private thought, and then, louder, "Without instructions. Without ever having seen a radio before." He looks to Raven. "They could probably do a lot more with a little help."

" _We_ could do a lot more too, if we had more time, more people, more resources..." Sinclair lets another long breath and shakes his head. "We're trying to focus all of our energy on rebuilding the ship, turning the tracking beacon back on, getting our radios working, bringing back our electricity, and we could do all of that—"

"Except we still need to eat," Raven finishes. "We're not exactly Earth Skills experts here. Or doctors. We'd love to work twenty-four hours a day on this ship, but even those of who aren't invalids aren't functioning at full capacity."

Sinclair holds up his wrist, bandaged with a torn piece of cloth, as evidence, and Bellamy catches Clarke biting her lip. He can see every gear in her mind turning, her gaze jumping erratically from Sinclair, to Raven, to the broken radio transmitter, to the bag of medical supplies in her own hands—her thoughts, he imagines, just as unsettled.

"Hey," he says, and takes a few steps around the table, back to her side. "Speaking of casualties, how about we show Clarke the common room? She might actually be able to help."

"Might?" Her focused expression breaks, and she gives him a smirk as she looks pointedly down at his foot. "Like I might have helped fix up your ankle?"

"Talented and modest," he counters, and Raven laughs.

"All right, all right," she says, wheeling herself back and then pivoting around the table corner again. "Point taken. Detour over."

Sinclair comes with them as they continue down the hall and around the corner, to the open space at the far end of the ship that once was the Mecha Station common room. Bellamy remembers it well from his old patrol rounds, when he was in the Guard: Mecha was his first assignment, and his last, but back then the room was filled with tables and chairs, and now the tables have been thrown, by the ship itself, into a junk heap in the corner, and the space is filled with rows of makeshift cots. He counts forty in his first sweep of the room. Half are empty.

In the other half, people he vaguely remembers and others he doesn't know at all doze fitfully, or sit propped up on flat pillows, pale and thin and dazed, or lie curled up and feverish, facing away from him, the backs of their t-shirts soaked with sweat. Without a cooling system, the metal ship is baking in the sun.

The common room has no windows, and the survivors of Mecha have spared none of their few remaining lights for their sick ward. He'd never guess the hour, if he didn't know it was still morning, and the shapes of the weak and the dying form little more than restless, or eerily still, shadows, layered upon other shadows, in the dark. The air feels thick like cotton on his skin and tastes sour like sickness on his tongue.

Sinclair passes Clarke one of his handheld lights, and she holds it up high, flashing it from one end of the room to the next. Those who are aware enough to notice, to move, hide their faces with their arms or blink and frown into the glare. In the weak flicker of the light, Bellamy can see the way Clarke's face transforms, first sorrowful, then hard-set and determined and brave.

"Hey!"

As Clarke holds the light up, one figure, the only one not lying prone in bed, turns around abruptly and barks out a greeting so accusatory that it makes Clarke jump. He'd been sitting next to one of the closest beds, gently dabbing sweat from the brow of one of the sick women: the only caretaker in sight. "What do you think you're doing?"

"I'm so—" Clarke starts, but before she can even finish the word, the man’s expression breaks into a grin.

"Is that Bellamy Blake?"

Bellamy raises his free hand, gives the barest of waves. "Hey, Wick."

"You're popular," Clarke murmurs to him. He can hear the relief in her voice, now that she understands that Wick's rough greeting was only a joke, but Bellamy only rolls his eyes. Already, he's getting tired of being recognized.

"More like infamous," he mutters back.

Wick leaves the washcloth with the patient, pats her on the shoulder, then stands up and walks over to them. "Bellamy Blake and..." He tilts his head, staring at Clarke as if she were an apparition, a ghost haunting their downed ship. "Friend?"

"Clarke," she answers, and shakes his hand awkwardly, shoving her bag farther up her shoulder as it threatens to slip down.

"She's a Grounder," Raven adds. "We'll catch you up on the rest later. She wants to help with the wounded.

"Right, okay, filing the surprised face away for later—" Wick passes his hand in front of his face, as if transforming it by magic from shocked and slack-jawed to serious and resolute. "We could use any help we can get, as you might have noticed. I skipped the course in Engineering on bringing down fevers or... diagnosing... infections? I really don't know what I'm doing." He adds the last in a stage whisper, and shoots Raven a look when she asks.

"And how is that different from your day job?"

Clarke takes a deep breath, sets her shoulders straight and square on the exhale. "All right," she says. She's looking from one bed to the next, taking each one in slowly, like she's adding up the length and width and breadth of the task, while the other four look steadily at her.

"I'll need to know as much as you can tell me about each person." She glances at Wick, then Raven and Sinclair. "Which of you can help me with that?"

Wick raises his hand, a wary but willing volunteer. "I'll do my best."

"Great." Clarke lets her medical bag fall down into the crook of her arm, glances down at it and then at the row of beds again. It's full to the brim, but even Bellamy can see how small and ill-suited it is to the task. "I'll do what I can with what I have... I don't suppose you have any useful supplies here?"

"Not much," Sinclair admits. "Our main medical unit was on Alpha Station. The other stations had some emergency supplies but..."

"Do you want to go back to your village?" Bellamy asks, hesitantly, as he watches one of the patients in the farthest bed turn over once, manically, in his feverish sleep.

"No." Clarke shakes her head. "It's too far. I'll use my supplies, your ship's supplies—and I'll see what I can find in the woods. What we need to do now is stabilize them. Then we can transport them back to the village." She turns to Raven and Sinclair. "Can you figure out a way to get as many of your people as possible through the forest? Even the ones here? Bellamy can tell you about the trail and what to expect on the way."

"I'm sure we can design a few things," Raven answers, with a confidence and certainty that sounds as bright as happiness.

"It'll be a challenge," Clarke reminds her, "with so many of you injured—"

"All the better," Raven says. "Trust me, Clarke, you do your doctor thing, and we'll do the designing and building."

"Good." She nods once, reassured, then looks around again at the dark and gloomy space, flicks her eyes up to the low and shadowy ceiling. "First thing—have any of these people been outside recently?"

"I'm afraid not," Sinclair answers, shaking his head. "It was all we could do to move them here and get them passable beds to sleep in."

"So—not at all?" Clarke's brow furrows, and she takes a half-step closer, an unexpected urgency lowering her voice. "You've been on Earth for...weeks now? And they haven't been outside?"

"No, because everyone who can move is up and working," Raven says, sharp and defensive, pivoting herself in place as if fidgeting. "The people here are our worst cases. We've already lost more than a few since we landed. Keeping the rest of them alive, even barely, is the best we can do."

"Okay." Clarke softens her voice, pauses a moment as if she were backing down, then continues, "But if we can get even some of them outside, just for a couple of hours, it will help them. I promise. Fresh air and sunlight—you've been outside, Raven, you know it matters."

She'd like to argue. Bellamy can see it in the hard, thin set of her mouth. But she came out in the early morning light to feel the growing heat of the air and watch the ripples of waves across the lake; she knows; she's dreamed, just like the rest of them, of taking in the height of trees and watching flowers grow.

"All right," she says. "Well if we can't get them out of the ship, we'll never get them through the forest, anyway. It'll be a test run."

"Right," Clarke agrees. "And—I understand if we can't bring everyone on the first trip. We'll come back if we have to. But I think the more people we can take back with us, the better."

The others nod, moved by Clarke's determination, inspired and set to a purpose—Bellamy feels it too, as he watches Wick and Clarke walk over to the first bed, and then turns to Sinclair and Raven again. Another part of him is trying to picture Thelonious's face. All of the survivors of Mecha Station, limping and broken and sick, might not seem like an army but still perhaps like an invasion. And yet if all of them arrive at once, he won't be able to turn them away.

And the people of his village will never be able to forget or ignore what they have seen.

*

Clarke disappears for a time, in the long, slow-burning haze of late afternoon, while Bellamy is kept so busy that he does not immediately notice she is gone.

Despite his injured leg and his minimally relevant skill set, Raven and Sinclair find plenty for him to do, in the makeshift workshop they create in the entranceway of the ship. The space is cramped and too tight, and lacks any furniture beyond what they awkwardly drag into place, but at least they have light to see by, streaming in from a sky so cloudless and so blue that Bellamy cannot even look up at it without squinting, and lungfuls of fresh air when they remember to breathe deeply in. His knowledge of the forest trail and the various hidden treacheries of the journey makes him useful, even if he can't do much more than the simplest building, and he loses track of time in the warmth of the day and the narrow focus of the tasks in front of him. They build stretchers, wheelchairs, a modified cart that Jasmine can haul along the path. The Mecha survivors ask him questions about the Grounders, and he tells them about their houses, their clothes, their accents, their art, and as many details as he can manage about their food.

About Thelonious, he says almost nothing. About Clarke's little clearing, Wells's home, the house up in the trees and the stories of the ruins, he says not a word.

Every now and then, as they work, Clarke interrupts them, jumping over and around their projects as nimbly as she can, as she leaves the ship and then returns. Each time she passes them by, she greets Bellamy with a squeeze to his shoulder or a touch to his arm, a quick smile or a hello. She never stops to talk but he feels the reverberations of her presence, like small ripples in a pond, and his hands always lie idly for long moments in his lap as he watches her running out toward the forest, her loose hair shimmering in waves down her back. She comes jogging back each time with extra supplies from their bags or with plants or flowers she's gathered from the forest, pink-cheeked and slightly out of breath but always smiling. Smiling for them, he thinks. She is the first hint of hope and optimism anyone in Mecha has seen since they arrived on Earth, and she knows it, and she plays the part like it is just another aspect of her job.

He takes a break, once, and watches her work. Officially, he's returning to the inside of the ship to grab some more scrap sheet metal for Raven, but he takes a detour into the common room just to see how Clarke and Wick are doing. Wick is crouched near one of the injured men, helping him to drink something faintly green out of a beaker; Clarke he does not see at all, at first. Then he spots her sitting off to the side, cross-legged on the floor, working in the flickering glow from one of Sinclair's lights. She's crushing bits of leaves together in a bowl. As he watches, she sweeps her hair back and over her shoulder, and he can see the outline of her profile, the deep furrow between her brows and the pinched and focused expression on her face, the glistening of sweat on her skin.

He could stand in the doorway, all his weight on his good leg and tired and hungry and heat-dazed from the sun, and watch her like this for hours. The crumbling of the leaves between her fingertips, the quiet determination in her frame—how all of this energy and knowledge is being spent on people she doesn't know, because they are his people, and because they need her.

He pulls himself away because he can hear Raven calling for him.

Then for a while, he does not see Clarke at all, and he grows tired, but ignores it, and heatsick, and distantly dizzy. The white-blue of the sky begins to darken, almost imperceptibly, shading into darker blue, and when he looks straight up and through the doorway of the ship, he can no longer find the round, blurred outline of the sun just above. He notices for the first time the mellow, golden tinge to the light, the softness of the still unrelenting heat.

From far off at the horizon, where the border of the forest begins, he notices movement. His eyes narrow. He tries to remember the last time he saw Clarke, if she was coming or going, but the day has turned into a jumble of slurred impressions in his memory—he sits up straighter, trying to discern the strange outline of the figures walking onto the beach.

Sinclair and Raven have noticed them too, paused in their work to watch the progress of the arrivals, but only Bellamy stands up, reaches for his walking stick, and starts to limp his way down the ramp toward them.

By the time he's halfway across the metal floor, he can see that the figures are Clarke and Wick, and that they are moving slowly and awkwardly because they are hauling something large and oddly shaped on a tarp between them. They meet Bellamy at the edge of the floor, where they drop the tarp abruptly down, and the edges of it fall away to reveal something stiff-limbed and glassy-eyed and dead.

For a long moment, Clarke and Wick catch their breaths, and none of the three speak. Bellamy cannot stop staring at the open, unblinking black eye.

He pokes at one hoof with his walking stick. "What is that?"

"It's dinner!" Wick answers brightly, still out breath but smiling as he wipes at his forehead with the back of his sleeve.

"It's a deer," Clarke amends. When Bellamy doesn't immediately answer, the light, exhausted smile on her face fades, and she steps closer to him and reaches for his hand. "I would have taken you hunting but Wick is the only one here who can carry something so heavy—"

"I'm not jealous." He waves the concern away with barely a glance at her face. Though he can tell she's watching him, he's still staring at the animal. The deer. He's never seen anything like it, not even in his Earth Skills books, and even if he had, the shine of its coat and the thin bends in its limbs, and its infinite wide-eyed, one-eyed stare, are beyond anything a photo could have captured, or anything his imagination could have divined.

The deer. He does remember one, vaguely, in a large table of animals. The graph was organized alphabetically, names and simple artistic renderings paired with places of origins and general traits. Deer, common in this part of the Earth, yes. But this one is not right. Its two eyes are not symmetrically placed, and as the head narrows down to the nose and mouth, it splits, so that a second, half-mouth juts out from the side. The line between the two halves of the face is inflamed and red.

"Why does it have two faces?" he asks.

Clarke shrugs. "Some of them are just like that." She reaches for his arm again, links both her arms around his and leans in against his side, his hand pressed between her hands. He thinks at first that she is trying to distract him. Then he glances down at her face and sees that, for a second, her eyes have fluttered closed. Her skin is sun-pink and sweaty and her hair sticks in thin tendrils to her forehead, and her body feels heavy, nearly limp against his. "Don't worry," she adds, opening her eyes again and looking up at him. "They still taste the same."

He opens his mouth to answer, is distracted by the sound of rolling wheels behind him. Over his shoulder, he catches sight of Raven and Sinclair approaching, both of them already craning their necks for a sight of the strange animal on the tarp. Raven spares a glance at Bellamy and Clarke though, flashing him another sharp and teasing smile that makes him want to stick out his tongue, as if he were still thirteen years old.

"Clarke brought us a feast," Wick announces, throwing up his arms, still grinning.

"With only a little help from you, I'm guessing," Raven answers, dry, and Wick just shrugs.

"I thought I'd mix it up and be the brawn instead of the brains for once. Lucky for you, Reyes, I'm well-suited to both."

"Yeah, brawn, brains, _and_ ego I see."

"They could go on like this for a while," Sinclair says, turning to catch Clarke's eye. "How do we go about...cooking this thing?"

Somehow, Bellamy's arm has wound its way around Clarke's shoulders, and she's leaning in against his side. She looks up at Sinclair's question and only reluctantly starts to pull herself away. "I'll show you," she answers. "And, if you have enough chairs and stretchers built, I was thinking we could all eat outside?"

They manage to move all but the most feverish of the wounded out onto the metal floor, along with pillows and blankets to take the place of tables and chairs. Clarke teaches a lesson on the proper method of preparing and cooking wild game, while several engineers collect plates and cups from the station and pour water from the ship’s repaired filtration system.

The sun has all but set by the time they are ready to eat. Only a final, brilliant, bright flare of color still bleeds at the horizon, as Sinclair and Wick help Raven out of her wheelchair and onto the blanket they've spread out by the edge of the lake. Bellamy and Clarke arrive a moment later, with five carefully balanced dinner plates, and sit down, exhausted and sweating and wretchedly hungry, ready to eat.

Clarke devours her food with the same intense focus as the Mecha Station survivors, and Bellamy, who has barely allowed himself to breathe since he took his first long drink of water and his initial, tentative bite of two-faced deer, has to remind himself that she has probably never known a day of such hunger before. Nothing like what they knew on the Ark. His hunger, Raven's, Sinclair's, is chronic; even after his feast in the village two days before, he does not know if he will ever be sated. He does not know if he would recognize the feeling as anything but a sort of sickness, even should he fill himself to bursting as he wants to do. They do not talk as they rip into the fresh meat, the occasional, accidental click of plate against cup or plate against plate the only interruption to the stillness. Above the sounds of his own teeth grinding, he can hear the ripple of the waves across the sand and pebbles of the shore.

With the setting of the sun has gone the worst of the heat. His sweat cools and dries along his forehead and between his shoulder blades.

Only when his plate is empty does he look up, and notice the peaceful quiet that has settled over the lake, how all of the manic, hungry energy that animated the survivors as they grabbed their food has dissipated, how they rest, now, in groups of three and four and five, lie back half-propped against the pillows or on their backs on the metal floor and gaze up at the sky. Here and there, he sees people talking, but not many. Their voices must be little more than whispers. Above the sound of the lake, there is no background conversational hum.

His own group is silent, too. Wick falls backward with a dramatic thud, splays his limbs out in crooked patterns and lolls his head to the side, staring out behind Raven to the water and the steady rippling of the waves. Raven herself is holding her stomach, and as Bellamy watches, her eyes briefly flutter shut. Sinclair seems almost dazed as he looks down, nearly unblinking, at his empty plate.

When Bellamy turns to Clarke, he finds her already staring at him.

He manages a half-smile. "Not quite the dinner scene you're used to, I guess," he says. Only two days ago, he sat at her table, surrounded by the warmth and laughter of her neighbors and friends, ate lovingly prepared food by the low glow of candlelight, listened to the strange chirps and calls of insects and animals in the pauses of conversation. He felt the long unwinding of the evening like a presence all around him, unhurried and sedate.

"Not what you're used to either," she answers, and he realizes that she's pitching her voice low to match his.

Bellamy smiles. He lets his tired body sway towards hers, his shoulder bumping up against her shoulder, like tree leaves brushing against each other in a breeze.

"I can honestly say," Sinclair announces, without taking his eyes off of his plate, "that that was the best meal I have ever had." He sounds dazed, utterly in awe, and Clark laughs.

"I'm glad," she says. "Maybe you should sleep it off before tomorrow."

“Maybe we all should,” Wick answers. “Even if that means getting up.”

Standing up is a momentous challenge, though Bellamy refuses to admit it, half-turns away to hide the brief scowl of pain on his face as he gets to his feet. Clarke catches sight of it anyway. "You don't have to help clean up—" she starts.

Bellamy shakes his head, readjusting the grip on his cane and shifting his weight between his feet. "I'm fine. Hardly hurts anymore."

"Liar," Raven declares, from behind him, as Sinclair and Wick set her awkwardly down into her chair again. "Let the damn thing heal, Blake."

"I'm sure Wick would be happy to tell me how much of a hypocrite you're being right now."

"At least I'm not walking on mine. Here." She starts to move forward, catches her wheel up on the blanket's edge, and forces herself to reverse. "You can help me finish packing our supplies for the trip. It's sitting down work."

He hesitates, but Clarke is already folding up their blanket, while Wick and Sinclair stack the cups and plates. "Go," she says. "We've got everything handled here."

The inside of the ship feels stuffy and too close, too dark, after the fine, warm moonlit night outside, and all Bellamy can think as he limps along by Raven's side is that he'd rather steal a blanket and sleep outside on the ground than spend one more night in this hot metal tomb. He startles when Raven speaks.

"So—you and the Grounder."

"Clarke."

"Clarke."

He glances down. They're moving slowly by the light of a shard of broken solar panel, but even in its faint glow, he can see Raven's sharply raised eyebrow, her unconcealed half-grin.

"What about her?" he asks.

"Am I invited to the wedding, or is it family only?"

"Oh, shut up."

If he could walk any faster, he'd leave her behind in the dark. The thud of his walking stick sounds louder, striking with irritation against the floor.

"I'm serious," Raven says, rolling herself forward to keep up with his attempt at a quicker gait. "I mean, not about the wedding exactly. But I'm not _completely_ unobservant here."

"That's very nearly modest of you."

"Funny. So is there something going on between you two?"

Bellamy stops up short next to the storeroom, and Raven pivots neatly around to look at him.

"Why do you care?" he asks.

She shrugs. "I'm just curious. All this time, we didn't even know there were survivors down here. You're probably the first one of us to meet one of them and then you fall for her? That's a good story, Bellamy, if nothing else."

"I haven't—I don't know." He lets the hand holding the light fall, and it flashes their shadows like giants against the corridor wall. "I don't know," he repeats, quieter now.

He only knows how it felt, tucking a flower gently behind her ear, the touch of her lips and the distant explosion of the flares. And last night, her hands small and soft, pulling him closer in the dark—

Raven lifts up her chin, sharp-eyed and certain despite the gloom. "Well, I know she's pretty great," she answers, just before she turns herself around, and leads the way into the pitch-black of the storeroom. Bellamy lifts the light again and limps his way in after her. "So try your best not to fuck up."

*

That night, he finds Clarke standing on the shore of the lake, a small, shadowy figure against a clear and starlit sky. She's staring out at the woods on the opposite side of the water, but she turns when she hears him approach. Up close, he notices that she's taken off her shoes and rolled up her pant-legs, that she’s waded from the pebbled sand beyond the grass and into the lake itself. She’s up to her ankles in the water while he stands, in his stuffy Factory-issued boots and thick socks, suddenly too aware of every awkward, hot, and aching muscle in his body. He feels swollen and sore and too big for his clothes, and he wonders what the cool ripples of small waves might feel like against his skin.

"You're still awake," he says, with a slight clearing of his throat, flicking his gaze quickly up to her face when he hears her splashing her way onto dry land. In the full glow of the moon, her expression is clearly visible: a tentative smile, edged with apology, a weariness about the eyes.

"So are you," she answers. Then she sighs, looks up for a moment at the sky and then the wide expanse of the water ahead of them, and then finally at him. And everything about her softens, even the hint of smile, and he doesn't think but wraps his arm around her shoulders again. Immediately, gratefully, she relaxes against his side. Her arm settles across his lower back.

Bellamy closes his eyes. The air here, still warm but thinner now at night, undisturbed by any breath of breeze, has a strange softness to it, and an undeniable scent. It seems made up of many parts, defined by the chirp and trill of night noises from the forest and the whisper of waves lapping up over the sand and stones at their feet. The disturbances of the lake sound, he thinks, like someone trying to dig a hole in the water: sloshing bucket after bucket after bucket from the great pool of it, and his efforts leading nowhere, creating only an eternity of sound.

He might fall asleep here on his feet.

"What do you think of Mecha Station?" he asks, as he forces himself to look out across the lake again. He curls his arm tighter around Clarke, and she shuffles closer, resting her head against his shoulder and the edge of his chest. He doesn't want her to think he's dozing, does not want to actually doze, but he's curious, too. They've known each other for so short a time, and yet already it feels odd to spend a whole day unable to talk to her.

She doesn't answer for a long moment. He glances down, but can't see much more than the dull sheen of her hair and the slope of her nose.

"I think..." She tilts herself forward, staring past him at the scarred and broken behemoth to their right. "I think I can't believe that thing could fly."

Bellamy laughs. "Obviously not very well," he jokes, and she laughs too, and he's glad she can't see how quickly his own smile fades. The opposite is true, of course: that it probably took the combined intelligence and skill of every engineer and mechanic on the Ark to bring the stations down. At the cost of how many of their own lives, he may never know.

"It really is more than anything I could have imagined, Bellamy," Clarke says, quietly now. "You've shown me a new world today. I'm grateful for that." She pauses a moment, then adds, "I'm sorry we didn't find your sister."

"Me too,” he answers—all he can say at first, and even then, the words sound ground out from the back of his throat. Placeholder words. To say anything more is to open himself up, with effort, with force. "But—the station is still out there. The tracking signals that Alpha picked up are coming from somewhere. And if their beacon is still working, then they must be in better shape than Mecha. That means there's hope."

Clarke hugs him tighter. He can feel her nodding, her hand rubbing his back.

A deep, inquisitive sound calls from the trees: _who-who, who-who_. How wide this forest is, this Earth is, he cannot fathom. Maybe someday he'll regret daring to feel hope at all.

"As long as there's hope, we'll keep looking," Clarke promises.

The waves climb up and all the way to their feet, splashing over Clarke's toes and Bellamy's boots.

"It's really beautiful out here," he says, because he can feel the shakiness in his breath as he inhales, and he's not ready to dig too deep into this feeling. Any of these feelings. The acrid disappointment when he saw the outline of Mecha Station through the trees, and recognized it, and had to bottle up every stray scrap of anger before it could escape, and every threat of worry and cold despair too—or this other feeling, gratefulness and comfort and warmth, something the opposite of homesickness, as he'd always thought it might be, but just as bittersweet.

"It is," Clarke answers, soft and wistful, so quietly that he almost doesn't hear. "We used to go out here every summer when we were kids. Spend a few days at a time by the lake—it’s just far enough away from the village that it felt like a real adventure. A couple years ago, our parents let us make the trip ourselves for the first time and Wells—"

She stops herself abruptly, as if too suddenly aware of Wells's name on her lips.

"Wells built us a campsite first, and I tried to hunt us dinner." A bubble of soft laughter breaks the words. "But I wasn't any good at it. So we ate the food we'd brought with us, and then at sunset we went swimming. We'd never been alone so far from home before. It was like—not like being adults, but like a very good game of pretend. Like seeing into the future and thinking, it will always be wonderful like this. And we promised each other we would always live in the same neighborhood and always be best friends—"

The crack in her voices makes him wonder if she's about to cry, but when he untangles himself from her arms and turns to look at her, he sees that her eyes are bright but clear. "Hey," he says, framing her face with his hands, his fingers carding briefly through her hair, "if there's hope for Octavia, there's hope for Wells. I mean, come on, Clarke, you walked through a spaceship today. Anything's possible, right?”

She smiles, still tentative and small, and nods. "Anything's possible."

The idea seems like a glimmer of starlight splashed against the darkest part of the sky. She reaches for him and he wraps his arms around her. The solid weight of her against him, and the easy way her body fits against his, how small she seems and the exhales of her breath against his neck, are the strongest, clearest optimism he's ever felt; every flare of hope he ever thought he knew seems now like only determination and blind need. He can hardly breathe for it, and yet every breath is better than any breath on the Ark ever was. When she pulls back, slowly, and tilts her head up to look at him, he leans down until his forehead touches hers. His palm settles against her cheek again.

He exhales, easy and slow, and lets his eyes close, feels in the same moment her nose bumping against his. Lips find lips like stumbling in the dark. His fingers tangle in her hair and her own hands, soft and small, rest at his cheek, fingertips against his jaw. She reaches up on her toes to meet him. The kiss starts slow, stays slow—they are paused now, rushing toward nothing—together and alone beyond the shadow of the ship, tempted by curls of cool water waves at their feet, tiny beneath the high vault of the stars.


End file.
